Stuff You Should Know - The Harriet Tubman Story

Episode Date: February 15, 2018

Harriet Tubman is a legendary figure in history, but the details of her life are even more remarkable than what you may have learned in school. Listen in today as Josh and Chuck pay tribute to a true icon of African-American history. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, we are going on tour in 2018, and where are we going? On April 4th, we're gonna be in Boston at the Wilbur. You can get tickets at thewilbur.com, Chuck. And then on April 5th, we're gonna be in D.C.

at the Lincoln Theater, and you can get tickets for that at Ticket Fly. That's right, and then we're going to two new cities, right? Yep, on May 22nd, we're gonna be in St. Louis. You can get tickets on Ticketmaster. And on May 23rd, we're gonna be in Cleveland, and you can get tickets there at PlayhouseSquare.org.

And then there's one more, Chuck. That's right, we're gonna wrap it up in Denver, specifically Inglewood, Colorado, at the Gothic Theater on June 28th, and possibly adding a show on the 27th. Stay tuned for that. Yep, and you can get tickets at AXS.com. So come see us live.

We'll have a good time. Come on out. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. ["Tuff You Should Know"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there.

And this is Stuff You Should Know in Black History Month. Ta-da! How you doing, man? I'm tired. Are you? You've been burning the candles at all three ends, huh? I didn't know candles had three ends, and look at it.

When they work as hard as you, Chuck, they got three ends. So bright. How are you doing? You holding up, at least? I don't know. I'm a... It's TBD. I know you see these circles.

Yeah, they're a little pronounced. I wasn't gonna say anything, but that's fine. Yeah, I guess when that circles, they're half moons. Yeah, they're, well, they're half moons the size of half dollars. A lot of people say circles under their eyes when they're not circles. I wonder if they're just seeing the rest of it,

like their mind is filling in the rest, who knows? Maybe they're all just insane seeing something we're not. Maybe so. Well, at any rate, we're all pulling for you. You need any soup or anything? No, Jerry's got that, as he can smell. Yeah, it's kind of nice, the stage ears.

What is that? It's her, well, she won't talk, so. Right. She's just, she's doing sign language for ramen. I love ramen, don't you? Sure. Nothing perks you up like ramen, except. Yeah.

A really great history story. That's right. We're gonna do that today. Way to go choosing this one, Chuck. Is this, was this a request of yours or did it just so happen it was on the site? No, I just, you know, I've been wanting to cover more famous women in history and obviously

during Black History Month this is a perfect time to talk about Harriet Tubman and this article points out and I thought very astutely like her legend and her, her icon ship. Iconoclastichood ship. Yes. It's so great that I think sometimes a lot of people may not even know the nitty gritty details of her life,

you know? I mean, I know I did and I was, you know, raised in America in the 70s and 80s as a school kid into the mid 90s, we could even say. And like I knew of Harriet Tubman, I was taught to honor and respect her for what she did as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. What I didn't know is that that was about a third

of the reason why she's famous and legendary. Yeah, I mean, the school lessons were shamefully short because that's about all I learned was just about the Underground Railroad, her role in it to a very limited degree that they taught us that is not her role and that was kind of it. Yeah, but the fact that like, I mean, there's so much more to this woman's life.

She just did so much, she packed so much life in, whether it was by her own accord or against her, well, she's had a very long, full life. And the fact that we know about the life of a 19th, a mid 19th century black woman who was born a slave in Maryland that we know this much about her really speaks volumes. I'm glad that there's this much out there

and it seems like there's more and more being added to it every day. Yeah, it definitely helps that in the 1860s, there was a very famous biography written by Sarah Hopkins Bradford, one of the earlier biographies. And since then, we've learned some more stuff and cleaned up a bit of the truth from the legend, but it only got better.

Yeah, I mean, the stuff that is verifiable fact is still just astounding. It kind of makes me feel like a lump and a loser. I'm not doing much with my life. Well, we're teaching people about Harriet Tubman at least. It counts for something, I guess. All right, so you want to start at the beginning? Yeah, in the beginning, of course,

because Harriet Tubman was born when she was born, there weren't great birth records for black people in the United States at the time. So we don't know for sure when she was born. 1825 is what she has claimed on various documents later in life, but I've seen everywhere from 1820 to 1825. So somewhere in that range. Yeah, this article on Hustafork says 1822.

I've seen that in various places too, and that is shameful in and of itself. Yeah, but again, it's not like the people who were not keeping records on slave births at the time were like, well, this lady's actually gonna grow up to be one of the most legendary women in American history. So we should probably note this. The thing is, is even though they didn't note her birth

because they didn't realize how famous she was gonna be, she started to make a name for herself pretty early on in life. She had about five years to kind of be raised as a child before she was hired out as a basically an infant rocker. Her job was to stay up at night and rock an infant to make sure that the infant didn't cry. And every time the infant cried,

she would get a lashing from what I understand. Yeah, and just reading through kind of her early life, it seems like, well, let me couch that for one second. She was one of nine children born in, like you said, in Maryland, in Dorchester County, unless they pronounce it Dorster. I'm not sure. Toiley County, which is along the eastern shore

to Benjamin Ross and Harriet Ritt Green. Yeah. And her, she was actually born our very beautiful name, Araminta Ross. Yeah, I had no idea about that, did you? No, and her parents called her Minty, Minty Ross, which is just a very kind of cute nickname for a kid. It is.

And she was actually a third generation slave in America. Her grandmother on her maternal side was named Modesty. And her family's done some research and have concluded that Modesty was almost certainly from the Ashanti group and was stolen either from the Ivory Coast or Ghana. Right. And then was taken eventually to Maryland,

where she was owned by a guy named Athal Paterson. Is that right, Paterson? I think so. So the thing about that and the reason why this guy really kind of figures into the story in a cringe-worthy way, Athal Paterson, who then owned Harriet Tubman's grandmother and then mother and then Harriet and her siblings,

because they were all from the same line, he had in his will that when any of them turned 45, they were free, they were what was called manumitted. Yes. The problem is he was dead, so he wasn't around to enforce his will and that actually never happened. So even though on paper, legally, Harriet Tubman,

all of her siblings, her mother and her grandmother, all should have been manumitted whenever they hit age 45, absolutely none of them were. Yeah, and her father did gain his freedom, but was still married to a woman who did not have her freedom. And you don't hear about this a lot in the history books, where families were divided between free and owned, which makes a bad situation even worse, you know?

Yeah, and I'd like to look into that because that kind of popped up here there and almost casually, like without much explanation. So I wonder what that was like. Was it just like, you know, you both went to work and did basically the same labor, but one of you was paid for it? Was there like less physical punishment or coercion?

Like what was the distinction? Yeah, I'm not really sure. I'm not curious. But like what I was setting up was, after she worked as a child care baby rocker of sorts and got whipped on the neck by the woman of the house every time her baby cried, which that's, you know, that's a whole other thing.

Yeah, and again, she's five at the time. Yeah, five years old. She went on to work on the farm later on when she got a little older and by all accounts, for the rest of her working life, as a slave was much preferred working on the farm and basically was like, I don't wanna work for these white women.

They're worse than the men or at least in her case. Plus also, I mean, she was pretty able bodied. So you supposedly was super muscular from doing physical labor for so many years. And was pretty good at it. Yeah, five feet tall and from what I could tell, just as strong as could be. Right.

So the owners of her family, Ethel Patterson's daughter and son-in-law, they were kind of like Michael Fosbender's family in 12 years of slave. They were not at all wealthy plantation owners, but they were just out of the social hierarchy at the time able to afford and keep slaves. But rather since they didn't have a huge plantation

for their slaves to work on, they would hire them out. That's how Harry ended up working at age five, rocking babies, or she was hired out to go get muskrats out of traps and swamps and stuff like that. Just like basically whatever somebody needed an extra hand for, they would contact this family and the family would hire out their slaves just to make ends meet basically.

Yeah, that's right. And I think most of her brother and sisters did the same thing for what I could tell. And she grew up working and eventually they brought her inside as housemaid even though she preferred to be outside. And once again, when she was inside, she would be whipped from the mistress of the house

if her work and her dusting and her cooking and dishwashing was not adequate enough for her. And she suffered, it was just part of daily life basically until this incident as a teenager really kind of changed things for her. She was in a store and there was a fugitive slave that was, I couldn't quite tell if he was in the store or just trying to get out of the store,

but her overseer went to confront this fugitive slave and Harriet I guess got the bug of trying to help a slave get away early on and literally got in this man's way to let this fugitive slave get away. He already had this weight, this iron that he was I guess trying to swing and throw at this fugitive slave and he ended up hitting Harriet in the head

and caused a really severe head injury to her. Yeah, for the rest of her life, she had a traumatic brain injury. I mean, getting hit in the head with a two pound weight, that's bad enough, but the fact that it's happening in the middle of the 19th century and there's basically nothing they can do for you medically, too a slave as well.

They didn't exactly send her to the best hospital in town. So she, as a result of that brain injury, it's been later diagnosed that she developed narcolepsy, cataplexy. They called it at the time sleeping sickness, but she developed this thing where she would just fall asleep out of nowhere. No matter what she was doing, she would just fall dead asleep

and would stay that way for hours sometimes and could not be routes. You could not wake her up at the time. And then during these periods, she said that she would have very vivid religious dreams and they kind of attribute her super religiousness, I guess you would call it, that really she carried throughout her life

kind of came from these dreams. She was an extremely devout religious person and a lot of it was this idea that she was being kind of personally guided by God through her life thanks to those dreams. Right. And this, that narcolepsy or the repercussions from being hit in the head like that did not serve her well in her life as a slave either.

As you can imagine, her overseers did not, they were not sympathetic to the fact that she was injured and could not be roused. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. No, she was like recovering from her head injury still and they were trying to sell her but couldn't find any buyers. And that also is kind of pointed to as one of the driving forces

for what made her escape finally when she's like, I'm out of here. She was very worried about being sold off and separated from her family. So she would have rather had control of the situation and separated herself from her family. So she could come back if she needed to. So she was worried about being sold off

because she just couldn't work like the others anymore. And she took off on 18, March, 1849 for the first time she escaped. Yeah. And she was married by this point. In 1844, she married a free man named John Tubman. And the marriage wouldn't last long but she did keep that name and then began, and I'm not sure why,

but began using her mother's first name, which was Harriet. So that's how she became Harriet Tubman. And her husband refused to go basically when she said, I'm getting out of here. So she got her brothers, been in Henry to run away with her after a couple of weeks on the lamb, been in Henry. You know, it was a scary life out there as a fugitive slave. And they said, you know what, I'm going to go back.

And she said, well, she went back with them initially but then said, you know what, I'm out of here. And then she went all by herself. Yeah. So the following September, September 17th, 1849, she left again by herself. And she basically, it was a rehearsal for what she would do later on as a conductor on the Underground Railroad.

She traveled at night. She used the North Star as a guide. She stayed during the day with Quaker families who were abolitionists that would hide her under the threat of persecution and prosecution, I should say. This is 1849. So at the time, the laws weren't quite as strict. But as we'll see, they definitely got stricter.

But it was still like you could, you know, go to jail or get in trouble for housing a fugitive slave. So these people were definitely putting their necks on the line to help her. And eventually she made her way through Delaware and into Pennsylvania, which was a free state. And I don't know if it was ever a slave state. I think it was probably founded as a free state.

And when she got into Pennsylvania, she compared it to showing up in heaven, basically. Yeah. The sun came like gold through the trees and over the fields. And I felt like I was in heaven is the direct quote, which is just a wonderful, wonderful thing to say. And like, I can't imagine the feeling after being on her own. Her husband wouldn't come.

Her brothers went back to be so brave. To go on her own, although she did get help along the way and to finally reach Pennsylvania. Man, it's just unbelievable. So the thing is, though, is she apparently always said later in life. And a lot of this we should say is from that biography of her from Sarah Hopkins Bradford, which was contemporary. It was done while she was alive in 1869.

So this is her telling her own story. But she said basically right out of the gate, you know, she was glad to be in Pennsylvania, but there was a part of her missing. Like she'd left her family behind. Her husband was still back there. She never had kids. She never gave birth to a kid, but later on she would adopt the kid. But she had like nieces and nephews there.

And she just felt like her family was back there and they needed to be free as well. So she resolved basically from the outset to get them whenever she could. That's right. And that's a good place to take a break. I thought so too. Because it sets up her work on the Underground Railroad. We'll talk about that right after this.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? Also leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

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And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck, so we're back. So it's 1849, and late 1849, Harriet Tubman escaped and made it to Pennsylvania. And she settled in Philadelphia. She got work as a housekeeper, a cook, and she was getting paid now for doing labor, which was totally novel to her from what I can tell.

And what she did with this money, rather than like go buy some nice stuff, or have a ham dinner, or do whatever with it, she saved it to fund her trip back into the slave states into Maryland, below the Mason-Dixon line, to retrieve her family. That's what she did with her money. Yeah, she didn't even get Eagle's tickets. And it would actually, basically, that's the basis of what she did with her money for the rest of her working life, which is to say, the rest of her life.

She worked her whole life to make ends meet. And most of the time, it was because she could support herself, but she was also supporting other people as well, or trying to help other slaves escape. Yeah, so the Underground Railroad, we should probably do a full episode on that at some point. Oh, my friend, we did. Did we? June 2011. Well, no, I don't remember that.

It was a good one. Six years ago. That's good. Yeah, well, we got to bring it out for SYS case select. Yeah, for sure. In fact, maybe we should do that this month. Let's do it. So, I do remember now.

It was a good one. It was. But the Underground Railroad was a, it was, it worked differently depending on who you are. There was not one, like growing up as a kid, I always thought it was some direct line that was, they always use the same path. The Underground Railroad, depending on who you were as a conductor, which is what they called them, you had your own connections basically. Like you said earlier, sometimes they were these Quaker families, but they were always

friendlies who would help put you up and guide you from spot to spot along the way. Harriet Tubman ended up using, because she knew this land along the coast, she would go the route that she knew best as a friendly area. And they had all these ways of communicating in front of their owners and their overseers. A lot of times through song, they would use religious passages and sing things, sing these biblical songs that had all these secret messages in it. And of course, all the while, the overseers have no idea that they're actually sending secret messages to one another.

But yeah, one of them, Chuck, was that they were headed to Canaan, which is meaning you're heading to the afterlife heaven, I guess. And what that actually meant in code for the slaves who were preparing to escape was that they were heading toward Canada. Yeah. Which is about as free as it gets, it turns out. Yeah. She would go generally during the fall and during the spring because the days were shorter

and the weather was a little more friendly. She would leave on a Saturday because Sunday was a day of rest for the owner and they wouldn't find out until Monday morning and it wouldn't be posted and published until Monday. Probably not even Monday morning, because it's not like it was hot off the presses. It probably wouldn't even get out until later on Monday. Right. Well, if they only published the slave notices once a week, that means that the ones that came in on Monday wouldn't get published to the following Monday.

So it would give them like a full week of time to escape. Oh, did they only publish on Monday? That's what I got. Oh, okay. I didn't see that. So yeah. So she was a pretty sharp tack. She would also say, I'm going to meet you here.

She would pass information along to the slaves who were preparing to escape that she was going to conduct where to meet and it was invariably several miles away from where they lived so that it would become very clear if they had been followed by the time they met up with her. She also kept a pistol very famously with her, not just to protect herself or the people that she was conducting, but also to let the people she was conducting know that if they decided they were going to turn back, she was going to shoot them because she just couldn't risk them giving them up and betraying the rest of the group.

So it was once you were on the Underground Railroad with Harriet Tubman, there was no going back. You were going on until you reached a free state or were captured. There's one of those too. Yeah. The Tubman train goes in one direction. Yes, it does. And that is north.

That's what she put on her cards. That's right. And t-shirts actually. I think she had t-shirts too. Yep. All right. So she's, like you said, she doesn't make a trip. She makes trip after trip after trip.

There's a lot of speculation on exactly how many people, I believe in the original biography and the number you'll hear a lot is 300. But they have done some investigating since then. And some people have said it may have been like 70 people with another 70 that she kind of trained and taught and empowered to leave. But either way, it's a lot of folks. Yeah, for sure. 13 trips too.

I mean, like, that's 13 trips back to where she was considered a fugitive slave. Yeah. And eventually had a pretty sizable bounty on her head. I saw $40,000, which is about a million dollars in today's money, which means that there was a million dollars for her capture. And she still never got caught. People still never got her from Philadelphia. Because just as she would steal down to the, below the Mason-Dixon line, slave stealers

would steal up above the Mason-Dixon line and capture slaves and bring them back, especially ones that had a huge bounty on their head. So the fact that she had never been captured and that she kept going down below the Mason-Dixon line. So supposedly at one point she had to go through her old town where she had escaped from back in 1849. And the fact that she kept doing this stuff and her legend grew, like she just became well legend, like in her own time.

Yeah. And this is after 1850, you kind of hinted that things got even worse. That's when they passed, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. And this basically required all citizens to assist in recapturing fugitive slaves. It's not like you had to work full time doing this, but if you knew about it and you didn't do something to make it happen, then you were then liable. So basically everybody was, unless, you know, they were confirmed friendly. Everybody was after them.

Right. For sure. And that Fugitive Slave Act, in addition to, well, it did a lot of things, right? So before it was kind of like, if you were in a Northern Free State, the Fugitive Slave Laws didn't really apply to you because you were in a Free State. The fact that that Fugitive Slave Act made it a federal law, now everybody in the U.S. was subject to this Fugitive Slave Act. And it was one of those laws where you could be punished for not doing anything, like just

looking the other way. You could end up in jail for six months and be fined a thousand dollars. So anybody who was already helping on the Underground Railroad was at risk before, but now they were really at even more substantial risk after 1850. And as a result, the end of the Underground Railroad got pushed further up from Pennsylvania up to New York, all the way up to Canada. That was the end of the line for the Underground Railroad after 1850. Yeah, so as this is going on, as she is over a decade going back and forth down the eastern

shore of Maryland, freeing slaves, she is also successfully speaking at abolitionist fundraising meetings. She was well known and they would ask, you know, she was a public speaker, obviously very much on the down low because she was a super big target for these slave catchers, like you were saying, but this only just like enriched her legend that she would take breaks from rescuing slaves to go speak at a fundraising meeting. Yeah, and one of the reasons she was doing that in the first place was to make money to fund her work on the Underground Railroad.

Yeah. That's pretty impressive. Yeah, absolutely, because I mean, I imagine that most of those families were doing this for nothing, but I imagine they probably had to pay people off along the way. Yeah, especially in Canada, apparently you could bribe the border guards pretty easily to say, oh, you're visiting, huh? Well, enjoy your time in Canada and people would settle right across the Niagara River and St. Catherine's, Ontario is where a lot of them ended up.

All right, so in 1860, a very, very famous incident, and this is one of the most well-documented stories of the time. This was in Troy, New York, and there was a captured slave named Charles Null, and that was his real name. I can't remember the name that he had been given, but his real name was Charles Null. They were trying to get him back to Virginia after he had been captured as a fugitive, and everybody knew about it, including Harriet Tubman. She disguised herself as a little old lady, and if you've seen pictures of her, almost

all of them are as a little old lady. It's kind of hard to picture her as a young woman, but she dressed herself up as the little old lady that she would become in photos. She slipped into a building, a government building in disguise, and then basically gave the signal to all of these people in town who mobbed as soon as Null was brought out under the streets. They basically just mobbed him and took him away. Yeah, she went, get him!

And they swarmed. I thought it was cacal. All right. No, she went, swarm, swarm. But it worked, and I guess they just had enough people to overpower him and whisk them away on a riverboat. Yeah, and these were federal marshals that they overpowered. Yeah.

It was like, yeah, we'll be taking this guy from you. Amazing. That was in 1860, you said? Yeah. That was the same year, I believe, that she did her last trip on the Underground Railroad. Her second to last trip was her parents, who were very elderly at the time. Amazing. But they ended up settling in St. Catherine's, Ontario, at first, and then her mother was

like, it's too cold here, so Harriet moved them down to Auburn, New York. She moved to Upstate New York, where the winters are nice and mild. Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Almost muggy, you know? Yeah. So that was her penultimate trip on the Underground Railroad. The last one, she went to go get her sister, Rachel, who she'd been trying to reach for

a decade, and she went back in 1860 to get her and found that Rachel had died, actually. So she ended up taking a family that was prepared to leave, the Ennels. Did you read about them? Yeah. I mean, Harriet Tubman was not one to waste a trip down there, as sad as she was about her sister. She was like, all right, I'll take you guys. Yeah.

So the Ennels family was, from what I can tell, a younger couple with an infant child. And Harriet was like, we're going to have to dope up the baby because we can't have that baby crying. So I just happened to have some tincture of opium, and we'll give the baby some of that. So they kept the baby pretty high on this trip to make sure it didn't cry and give away their position. And that was her last one, 1860. Yeah.

And so, like we said, they relocated from Canada to Auburn, New York, and she bought land. She was a landowner, remarkably, in the 1850s, in Auburn, she bought seven acres of land at a very friendly price. From William Seward, right? Yes. And he was the guy who bought Alaska later. That's right.

So, yeah, so she's a landowner now, which is pretty significant, like you were saying. Should we take another break? I think we shall. All right. We'll finish up with, jeez, the rest of our life, which was also remarkable. Back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

It was AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist. So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh god.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Chuck, the end of that underground railroad, that was basically where my study as a younger lad of Harriet Tubman left off.

The rest of it, I had no idea about, did you? I had heard things here and there, but I for sure was not taught this in elementary or high school. Well, lay it on. Well, the Civil War breaks out in 1861 and the governor of Massachusetts, John A. Andrew, was very much an abolitionist and Tubman was a friend of his and he said, you know what, who do I know that is super stealthy and super sneaky and has a knack for making her way around the woods without attracting attention and can get information from us about the

Confederate army. How about my little buddy, Harriet Tubman? Yeah. And so she became a spy. Yeah. The governor of Massachusetts tapped her to become a spy for the Union army. So he paid for her passage down to Hilton Head, I believe, South Carolina. And she was enlisted officially under the cover story that she was there to give out

blankets and food and clothing to the slaves that were escaping in the midst of the chaos of war. There was a lot of slaves that were making their way to Union camps and finding shelter there. And her role supposedly was to make sure that they were cared for. Like I said, that was just a cover story. What she was actually there to do was to basically lead an intelligence gathering scouting group, basically assemble a guerrilla scouting special forces group behind enemy lines in South Carolina.

And that's what she did. Yeah. I wonder if any of the Union soldiers, when she showed up and said, you know, I'm here to give out blankets and stuff, they're like, yeah, right, I know who you are. We see those. You see those muscles. Yeah. You're not giving out blankets.

You're track record. So specifically she worked, it seems like most often with African-American troops. Once Lincoln authorized African-American troops for the Union Army in 1862, she would go ahead of these teams and do everything from try and get information on Confederate positions and armaments to working with these guys in June 1863. It's a really cool story. She accompanied Union colonel James Montgomery up the Combahee River. And this was in South Carolina, and they were going to conduct a raid.

And so what they found out was there are all these mines that had been set up by, were they by slaves or by? So under the direction of the Confederates, they had slaves go set mines out in the river. And so she went and found the slaves who had set the mines there so they could tell her where it was. Man, that must have been nerve wrecking. It was because not only did she go find out where it was, so that's step one, which is huge.

She went and got the intel where the mines were. She was in charge of leading, directing the Union ships around these mines. So I'm sure she's had her fingers crossed the whole time. But prior to that even, she had also led a raid of the scouts that she had assembled to gather intel and to get supplies behind Confederate lines from some sort of Confederate encampment. And that made her the first woman in U.S. history to command an expedition force in wartime.

Yeah, but sadly, for all her efforts, she was never given military pension like she should have federally, that is. No, so that's like a whole other can of worms, right? So she successfully makes it through the Civil War. And starting, right, I think in 1865, she applied for benefits, right? She asked for something like $30 a month. Even though scouts in the Civil War were paid $60 a month, regular soldiers were given a pension of $15 a month.

She asked for $30, and she was denied. And officially, the reason she was denied was because there was no documentation. Remember, like officially, her cover story was that she was handing out blankets and all that. And that first petition for a pension started a 34-year quest to finally get recognition in the form of a pension from the federal government for the amazing amount of stuff she did in the Civil War. And finally, despite the fact that there were cabinet members and congresspeople and governors

who were personally involving themselves in this matter, trying to get this pushed through, the Pensions Bureau was like, we can't do it. If we give it to her, it's going to open it up for all these other people. So it just so happens that she married a Civil War veteran who was much younger than her. And when he died, she started collecting a pension. So she got a pension not because of all of the stuff she did in the war. She got a pension because she married a Civil War veteran, a man who died, and she got a widow's pension instead.

Yeah. Well, she would eventually go get her own pension, but not for the work she does as a spy, but for work she does as an Army nurse. Right. So they upped it finally in 1899, 34 years after she applied from, I think, $12 a month to, no, $8 a month to $20 a month was what she got for the rest of her life. And guess who she spent that money on? Philadelphia Eagle Stickets.

Yeah. No, she spent it to open up a home while she bought some more property adjacent to her own property there in Auburn, New York. And she started a home for elderly African-American people. And seven years after that, she was kind of getting up in age by that point. So she turned the property over to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church where she went and said, you guys, can you please still run this thing? They said, no problem.

And she lived next door to it until she got old enough to where she needed to be in the home that she founded. And that is where she finally passed away in 1913. Yeah. The family legend is that on the day she died, she had been bedridden for a while, but she suddenly regained her strength and got up out of bed with some help and ate some food and went around and just kind of shuffled around from room to room, just taking in the house and then went back to bed and died.

Man. It's just pretty neat. Yeah. And in between that time, when she was living in upstate New York, she farmed and she, by all accounts, was a great farmer and lived off the land. And life was okay for her, but she also had a lot of fresh out off of the Civil War, had a lot of rude awakenings. It's not like things instantaneously changed for African Americans in the United States.

One case, in fact, she was on a train and she had what's called a soldier's pass, which she could ride the rails for free as a soldier. And she legitimately got this pass and the train conductor wouldn't accept it. She got into an argument with them and then he got together with other passengers and physically threw her into the baggage car, which broke her arm, broke three ribs. She couldn't work for months and famous Harriet Tubman had basically was forced to be bedridden for a while except handouts from her neighbors just to keep her family fed. Because she had had her arm and ribs broken at the hands of a conductor.

Isn't that horribly ironic? Yes. So that happened right after the Civil War, right? Yeah. So she was nursed back to health and like you said, she made ends meet farming, selling, I think she was known for selling pies and root beer and gingerbread is what she sold, which is pretty happy stuff really, if you think about it. I bet that was some good gingerbread.

And she lived with her parents. Remember her mom complained about the weather in St. Catherine's, Ontario. So she moved them down to Auburn, New York to her land and she cared for them. And she used some of the money to put one of her nephews who she'd earlier helped escape from slavery through school. He studied to become a teacher and moved down to South Carolina and taught and he eventually became part of the Reconstructionist Legislature there. She used her money pretty wisely.

Yeah, she opened that old folks home. She did a lot of really great stuff from the day she first got paid to the last day of her life. Yeah, she got married again too. She married a man, a Union Army veteran named Nelson Davis, 22 years younger than her. Yeah, that's the guy she got the pension from. That's right. She was born in 1869 and on her gravestone, it says Harriet Tubman Davis and she ended

up being buried with full military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, which is really, really great. They commissioned a Liberty ship, the SS Harriet Tubman during World War II. She's been in, well, they're developing a couple of movies right now. One with Viola Davis, which, you know, she's fantastic. So that should be good. Yeah. What else?

National Historic Landmarks from where she lived, National Register of Historic Places. Then finally, a couple of years ago, President Obama and his administration said, you know what, we are going to take Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill and we're going to put Harriet Tubman on it. It's hard to tell if that's still an active thing because all we know right now is current Treasury Secretary Steve Nunchin basically is declining comment right now and saying, we got a lot of other stuff to focus on. I saw a follow up two weeks later, that's the latest I saw, but two weeks after he initially

said that, that they were proceeding, that it was basically going through, but that it wouldn't be out until after 2026 because I think the $10 bill and then the $5 bill were scheduled to be updated first and then the $20 bill. So she's in the queue. She's in the queue, yeah, for sure. And that won't be the first time she's appeared on anything. She was on a stamp, I believe, back in 1979. I think she might have been the first African-American woman on a stamp, 1978.

Yep, it's pretty significant. But her being on currency is just a sea change in America and one to be proud of for sure. Yeah, for sure. So what else, man? You got anything else on her? Nothing else. That's Harriet Tubman in a nutshell. God bless her.

If you want to know more about Harriet Tubman, there's tons more stuff out there. There's actually a really good site that we both used called, I think, harriet-tubman.org. Don't spell out, I think, that was just me saying that and they have a lot of really good information on there. You can look for this article on howstuffworks.com by typing it in the search bar too. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. You know instead of listener mail today, we need to shout out our Kiva team because we have not done that in a long time.

I know we've been kind of neglectful. So kiva.org slash team slash stuff you should know or you can just go to Kiva and look up on the teams. Many years ago we started, for those of you who don't know, Kiva is a microlending organization and website where you can donate money in small amounts to entrepreneurs and business people all over the world who don't have the means to raise money themselves for their small businesses. And then you can relin that money once they pay it back or you can draw it out if you

want to draw it out. So we started a team many years ago and I haven't looked in a while and I was astonished. Have you seen what we've raised? Yeah. All right. Hold on to your hats. Okay, hold on. The stuff you should know team has now raised 4.7 million bucks.

What? How about that? That's amazing. That is 169,000 loans, 9,912 members and just to give you guys an idea of how this works, I put in and this was 8 or 9 years ago, put in 350 bucks, the only money I've ever put into it and since then that money has been re-loaned to the tune of $2,300 over the year. So you can even put in $50 and just keep re-loaning that over the years and through all those eight years, I looked at my account today, I've only had $42 in losses.

That is not bad. Not bad at all. So that's money that does not get paid back and as you can tell, that does not happen much. Yeah. And if you want to join our team, go to kiva.org slash teams slash stuff you should know and that team is our team is led unofficially slash officially by Glen and Sonya who keep things going pretty smoothly for us over there.

So thanks again Glen and Sonya for everything you've been doing all these years. Yeah. So I think a goal we can set right now, we always set money goals, but since we have 9,912 members, why don't we try and get to 10,000 members and that is not much. That's like less than 100 people signing on to the team, loaning a little bit of dough. Let's do 10,000 members by the end, by the summer, by June 1st and $1 trillion by June 1st as well. That would be great.

That would be cool. You can see, if you go to your account, they have follow-ups from people who you loan the money to, like real stories of what happened with your money and they're always just great stories and it's a really easy way if you have five cups of coffee worth of money laying around. Yeah. It's a donated. Yeah.

And if you want to know more about it, we've blogged about it extensively so go to stuff you should know dot com and look up kiva and it should bring up a bunch of posts. And for a good, I think, overview too, just go listen to the microlending episode from back in the day too. That's right. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, you can. You can do that. You can do it on Twitter at SYSK Podcast or at Josh M. Clark.

You can do it on Facebook, facebook.com slash stuff you should know or slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can send all of us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.